Venezuelan business owners face a new struggle as they migrate to Ecuador.

Two years ago, 53-year-old Aida Sandra decided to combine her Venezuelan roots and her new home, Ecuador.

She and her son, Andrea Estrella, boarded a truck full of bananas from Maracaibo to the Colombian border town of Maicao before arriving in Ecuador through an irregular and dangerous crossing.

They are among the more than 440,000 Venezuelans who have entered Ecuador in recent years, making Ecuador the country’s fourth-largest recipient of immigrants.

For some time, Sandra received food bags from the Venezuelan government and humanitarian organizations. But she was tired.

“I dreamed of being able to produce again, to earn my own money, to be able to go to the market and pick out what I want,” she said, sitting on a bench. Creating her own business was also a form of therapy to deal with the displacement. “I realized I needed to get back to my knitting to heal.”

It was then. Ida Sandria Crochet, her sewing career was born.

The orders started coming in one by one. Sometimes a small jacket, coat, hat or top. “Shattered pieces of who you are” was her social media motto.

At the same time, she started building local networks. She began teaching knitting at a community center in Carapungo, a densely populated neighborhood in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. She became a community leader by teaching other women how to monetize the items they were selling.

One day she received an order to make 100 hats in 10 days. “It was beyond my production limit, which was six hats a day, and I decided to get a group of women I had taken a knitting course with to help me,” she recalls.

So Sandra founded Tricolor Crocheters Without Borders (Borderless Tricolor Crocheteers), an association of Venezuelan, Colombian and Ecuadorian knitters.

Sandra’s lack of registration in Ecuador prevented her business from expanding. At this point, she earns around $300 a month. “Sometimes I make more, sometimes I make less, because it all depends on the order, but I’m at the point where my business can’t grow any more,” she explained. Many Venezuelans who immigrated to Ecuador are in a similar situation.

Diego Andrade – Technical Director of the Economic Inclusion Project of the World Council of Credit Unions and the US Agency for International Development – explains that due to the economic crisis in Ecuador, it is very unlikely that a person will find a decent job.

WOCCU-USAID aims to offset this situation by helping refugees develop businesses. It gives entrepreneurs the skills they need to make themselves sustainable. “That includes helping them get back on their feet emotionally,” Andrade said. The program has helped 5,000 entrepreneurs. 80 percent are not only self-sustaining, but have two to three employees.

Many of these initiatives do business with each other, growing the economy, for example Tejedoras sin Fronteras and Nutri Coffee, a coffee shop in Carapungo opened by Lenis Sosa, a 30-year-old Venezuelan woman who came with her family five years ago. Sosa is part of a knitting company.

But there’s a catch: Although Nutri Coffee Shop has a stove, refrigerator and five tables, chairs and a coffee machine, the shutters are closed. No customers. Nutri Coffee only provides catering services such as events.

Between 2018 and mid-2019, Ecuador’s Ministry of Labor counted 2,636 complaints of non-compliance with labor standards and sanctioned 3,399 employers nationwide. Seeing this, the members of Nutri Coffee chose to find another job and Sosa remained in charge. Now, until she adjusts her immigration status, she prepares the desserts, manages her customers and searches for people who are interested in hiring her.

“We thought we could work under the name of our Ecuadorian colleague, but if they find out we don’t have papers and we work for her, she might be punished,” Sosa said. The only person who helps her in the cafeteria is Sandraya, who she met at the community center in Karapungo. They became good friends, and Sosa suggested to Sandria that she set up a small storefront in the center’s cafeteria to sell knitwear.

In an interview with GK, the Ecuadorian representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Giovanni Basu, stated that the Venezuelan diaspora provides labor opportunities for Ecuador: 45% of refugees are between 26 and 35 years old, and 23% are of higher status. Education degree.

Starting in September 2022, Venezuelans who immigrated to Ecuador and do not have regular immigration status have a new opportunity to get their papers in order.

“It’s one of the great needs of thousands of Venezuelans: to be able to access justice, a job that provides legal benefits, access to credit, access to the banking system or RUC from the Internal Revenue Service,” said Carina Ponce of Mega Mujeres, a women’s organization.

The process is divided into three stages. In the first phase – which includes only those who entered Ecuador legally – about 324,000 people from the Caribbean region are expected to register for immigration status. However, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, there were only 86,500 people.

Sandra and her daughter Andrea entered the country through a secret passage – a a bit. “It was the time of the pandemic and all the borders were closed,” she recalls.

Because there was no formal entry point, neither Sandra nor her daughter could benefit from the regularization process. They had to wait for the third phase which started on February 17 this year. Upon completion, UNHCR estimates that most of the nearly 500,000 people who are part of the Venezuelan diaspora could be regularized in Ecuador.

Sandra knows that Ecuador entered through a a bit It has become the biggest failure of her life. But there was no other way. “If I had used that money to get a passport, I would have stayed there with a travel document that I could not use due to lack of money,” she explained. “I did what I had to do. … Opportunities are scarce, and threats abound.